This certainly can't be called a confirmation, as Hungry4info already said. Let's see how the paper is received. I'd love to see such an object discovered (though I don't see how it could have been missed in the past) - what a target for a New Horizons-type mission! But I'm not very hopeful.

1) They reject the "Nemesis" concept, saying the object couldn't cause "comet storms."2) They want to name it "Tyche" for the good sister of Nemesis.3) They're talking 1-4 MJ at 10,000 to 30,000 AU; to put that in perspective, note that even a probe like NH would take thousands of years get there.4) It's inclined 133 degrees to the ecliptic, but they think the orbit's circular.5) Depending on assumptions, they give as much as a 50% chance that this is an illusion caused by randomness in the observations.

Yeah, why in the world would they use math in trying to determine whether the effects of a massive object in the Kuiper Belt are present? Next thing you know they will start using it in computing spacecraft trajectories.

The merits of math aside, statistical inference is always to be taken with a grain of salt on its own. To paraphrase a quote I once heard, 'You can prove anything with a logarithmic chart!'

I see this paper as a bit of a roll of the dice by the authors. WISE might conceivably spot such an object; if it does, then they might go down in history as the 21st Century equivalents of Leverrier & Adams.

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

This paper reminds me of an article I read in Sky and Telescope ~20 years ago which also speculated that a group of comets with aphelia on a narrow band of galactic longitude were due to distant solar companion. I'll have to see if I can locate a copy.

They do mention IRAS, and sort of artfully adjust their constraints to account for the fact that it was not in fact previously discovered.

Well, the best part of this hypothesis is that it can be tested fairly rigorously. A lot of us here have been half-expecting WISE to discover at least one massive body closer than Proxima as discussed in other threads, and "half-expecting" is precisely the numerical probability assigned by the authors to this putative distant Jovian!

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

I hope this works out, and that WISE finds the object .. but can it? I remember reading that WISE couldn't find an Earth-size body at Kuiper belt (or was it Oort cloud?) temperatures. At that distance from the Sun, it'll be *really* cold ... but at Jupiter-mass plus, it should produce a significant amount of internal heat.

'Tyche' is a clever name.

QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Apr 27 2010, 05:07 PM)

3) They're talking 1-4 MJ at 10,000 to 30,000 AU; to put that in perspective, note that even a probe like NH would take thousands of years get there.

Yeah, if it exists, it'll take a new generation of propulsion technologies to get there in anything resembling a reasonable time. Presuming 20,000 AU, to get there in twenty years would require an average speed of 4740 km/s.

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